Driving EmpathyBroker Innovation

As of today, going online is cold and searching can be particularly frustrating. The goal of the Empathy Project is to create new Findability ways that are inspired on our capacity to express and understand emotions.

Searching for something that we desire or need is an extremely critical step within the online shopping process, especially when we believe that there is a result or an answer.

The Empathy Project intends to create empathy between the Person and the Site by using two fundamental instruments:

Real-Time monitoring of Social Media conversations around the searched product, correlating the words that People use with the words that Companies use.

Hitting the facial recognition unit within the human brain by adding motion and reshaping UX objects within the instant-motion search process.

EmpathyBroker emotive Site Search, benefits from the Empathy Project research, enhancing its rational features (Equalize, Link, Boost and Alert) with the art and science of interacting with people's emotionally driven nature when searching.

The Fundamentals of the Empathy Project

Back in 2008, when we first started thinking about the concepts that became the Empathy Project, we looked at the potential of Twitter and how we could mine the incredibly rich source of data to get a true real-time picture of what people were talking about in any instant of time, and what topics might trend in the future.

This immediately presents a fundamental problem, not only is Twitter huge but it doesn't work in a structured way, it is chaotic and has no start or end points. This is a problem for analysis: how do you analyze a chaotic system which doesn't have a beginning, a middle or an end?

The nature of the challenge

One of the first things they teach in maths is that when you want to solve a problem, first you have to understand the nature of the problem: is it linear or is it distributed? Linear problems need linear solutions, distributed problems need distributed solutions. Trying to solve a distributed problem with a linear solution is like trying to understand the climate by locating the main cloud in the sky, analyzing that, and then moving on to the next one. You'll spend a long time learning not very much.

Social Media Analysis isn't like that, isn't linear, is distributed. Trends propagate without any central control or linear direction – it's like a flock of birds, or stock market shares, each actor is independent, influencing the others, but control is distributed throughout the group. There is no boss bird telling the flock which way to go or no big central share guiding the market up and down. Twitter trends are the same, they cannot be traced back along a coherent line to a single source that controls the content; after the first tweet, the thing takes on a life of its own, propagating exponentially.

One of the developments we carry out at The Empathy Project is named the Cluster Sphere. Basically we take millions of tweets in a given language and generate clusters so detect conversational themes. Then we do the same thing with those messages that relate to a given industry or a specific product set to find the correlations between the two dimensions. Such approach to Social Media Mining is the classic example of distributed calculus.

Predicting future queries

We use this understanding to provide a distributed approach to SM mining that we use within the reality of our Site Search users, correlating their words with the shared words within Social Media. We were fortunate enough to work with the Basque government to develop this idea. We built a tool to see a real-time view of what was being said in the Basque Country and what terms were likely to trend before they actually did so. The Software Factory team built on this success with La Voz de Galicia newspaper to develop a tool to track local elections in and listen for mentions of the political parties and personalities, providing a notoriety ranking for each candidate which was converted into a prediction of the final results with remarkable accuracy. The key to this success was understanding that semantics are not the relevant and that Social Media is a distributed system that needs to be tackled in the same way that we predict the weather: not by looking at one cloud at a time, but having a system-wide understanding of the distributed whole.

Site Search queries represent demand, just as product mentions represent notoriety. The demand curve for many products is fairly easy to predict as it correlates the notoriety curve

There is a fairly constant demand across the year and a seasonal variation: popular authors like Stephen King and groups like U2 sell a fairly constant number of products across the year. Same would be true for a standard umbrella design, a frozen pizza, or a block of A4 paper for example. There will be a constant demand which doesn't change in the medium-term. The seasonal variation is also well understood, we know that people buy more books at Christmas and again in the summer to have something to read on the beach. Ice-cream sales jump in the summer, woolly hats sell more in the winter. So far so predictable, we can anticipate this element of demand and be proactive in ensuring that we have sufficient supply to maximize sales. Stock will be kept roughly equal to the constant demand plus or minus the known seasonal variation.

Unexpected demand & language

However the last element is the unpredictable variable - and this is where the Empathy Project deliverd its first unexpected and extraordinarily valuable results when it comes to adding empathy Site Search. With umbrellas we know what the stimulus is, it's the rain. We don't know when it's going to rain, but we know it will rain and across a timescale of weeks or months, we can predict the variable umbrella demand with reasonable accuracy - we don't need Social Media to tell us it's raining.

However demand for U2 will not change by that sort of stimulus, it will increase when the band tour, or appear on TV, just as Stephen King's sales will jump if he's interviewed or if he turns up on the news ... anything that increases his notoriety. If Julia Roberts walks out in the latest Hunter Boots, demand for those Hunter Boots will go up. This sort of variable cannot be consistently predicted because it is dependent on the notoriety of the item at any given moment in time: this is notoriety demand, highly specific, highly volatile, and a huge opportunity for eCommerce. A demand that pulses specially within the Site Search Visits.

This is where the Social Media Analysis carried out as part of the Empathy Project comes in. For instance Twitter is a thermometer for reading what's hot: for reading notoriety. For example, if Julia Roberts and Hunter Boots shoot up the trending topics, clever retailers should be configuring their search engines to hoover up traffic searching using these terms. If Stephen King wins the Nobel Prize for literature his notoriety increases, when someone types "king" into the bookstore search engine, Stephen King should come out ahead of an old out-of-print biography of King George III. Exactly in the same way a shop assistant would rank a request for "King" under those circumstances.

Empathy in language and demand context

Using Social Media as a tool for providing extra notoriety information to search experiences delivers empathy in terms of language and demand context. This means that EmpathyBroker can rank results according to notoriety or provide quick links for high notoriety options, methods which can dramatically increase conversion rates on eCommerce sites. It can even cleverly capture external search engine traffic by making the correct relationship between Julia Roberts and Hunter boots and have a results landing page ready to receive that traffic.

The Empathy Project is an ongoing innovation, continually looking for new ways to make using search engines into a more effective and more personal experience for users, and a tool which directly contributes to organizational objectives.

Empathy in design and expression

Besides adding human-social context to the words provided in a query, The Empathy Project researches on Expressive Design or how to make a person feel human when experiencing objects within a web or mobile interface. The objective of Expressive Design is to hit our faceal recognition unit within the brain by the addition of motion and reshaping of the combined UX objects that together present the Finding Experience.

We measure the positive impact of these elements of expression within the design of Findability Experiences such as the contraction of a navigation menu that you can see on stores like Zara.com (Worldwide), Adoreme (US) or the Search Result Page in motion of Hoalen.com

Within this field of Expressive Design we are creating completly new ways of finding, breaking away from grid based result presentation and exploring cloud based presentations that our human brain finds joyful and fun because it finds not only answers within the provided content but an empathetic process, where the user feels similar reactions to his or her actions.